This Police-Reform Activist Wants to Be Mayor of New Yorkhttps://www.thenation.com/article/this-police-reform-activist-wants-to-be-mayor-of-new-york/Peter MoskowitzAug 7, 2017

Robert Gangi has been butting heads with New York’s political establishment for decades as he’s fought battle after battle over criminal-justice reform, first as the executive director of the Correctional Association of New York, and then as the director of the nonprofit he started in 2011, the Police Reform Organizing Project.

In those decades, he’s earned a reputation as someone not afraid to speak his mind and call out politicians, even ones theoretically on the same side, for what he sees as injustices. That’s why, he insists, he’s running a shoot-the-moon mayoral campaign against incumbent Bill de Blasio.

De Blasio is a national progressive darling and fundraising powerhouse, but he’s also been criticized by activists to his left who say his promise to end New York’s “tale of two cities” narrative has turned into empty rhetoric, as the city’s police department has continued to disproportionately arrest black and Latino New Yorkers for low-level offenses (a policy called “broken-windows policing”), and as inequality and housing prices have remained high throughout his tenure.

Gangi knows he has a micro-chance of winning. He only has about $5,000 on hand. His campaign is being run out of his rent-stabilized Upper West Side apartment, where he’s lived for 42 years. He only has three paid staff members and a few dozen volunteers (but only one is a family member—and a second cousin at that—Gangi was quick to point out). But regardless of the outcome, Gangi said his main mission is to show New Yorkers there’s an alternative to the kind of bland progressivism championed by de Blasio.

I reached Gangi over the phone at his home in mid-July. The interview that follows has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Peter Moskowitz: Was there an “a-ha” moment when you realized you should run for mayor?

Robert Gangi: There was no one “a-ha” moment. I was director of the Police Reform Organizing Project, working with a number of other police-reform organizations. We thought we were doing very good work, putting out good documentation that exposed this starkly racially biased policing in New York City. We went from saying “in our opinion” to saying flatly, “NYPD arrest practices and other tactics are racist. It’s not a matter of opinion.” But we weren’t getting sufficient traction with the larger public and were certainly getting no meaningful response from the de Blasio administration.

The mainstream liberal response was to tweak at the edges of the problem but not take the steps that would represent meaningful change in terms of how cops interact with low-income communities of color and operate in those communities. Despite the drop in stop-and-frisk, and the increase in the kind of things that de Blasio brags about, like implicit bias training, policing in New York City on a daily basis under de Blasio continues to target low-income people of color.

So it occurred to me and to a number of other people that 2017 was going to be a mayoral race and there’s the opportunity, whether you’re successful or you’re using it as a platform to get attention to issues that might be hard otherwise to get attention to. The preface [sic] was to send a message, and even though we knew we’d be a long shot, we didn’t totally forgo the possibility that we could win. Even though de Blasio is polling well, we think his support doesn’t go very deep and that he’s vulnerable, particularly from a campaign that’s coming at him from his left.

PM: De Blasio ran on progressive promises. Whether he’s fulfilled them is another question, but how do you challenge someone who is already more progressive than most politicians in the country, and even in New York?

RG: God bless him, he makes it easy for us. He campaigned rhetorically as a progressive. He identifies himself as a progressive, he wraps the mantle around himself readily. A lot of the mainstream press have accepted that he is a progressive, and his actions and his policies and practices have not earned that identity. He supports broken-windows policing, which is almost by definition starkly racially biased policing. That’s obviously not the policy of a progressive. He has failed miserably to address the homeless crisis in the city. His latest proposal doesn’t even focus on providing more homes for the homeless, but building 90 new shelters—and their own projections are if they’re able to build the 90 new shelters, they will reduce the homeless population by 2,500 people in a five-year period, when there are over 60,000 homeless people in the city. His affordable-housing plan doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. When you take a close examination of it, you see that most of the units being built are by big real-estate companies, and profit-making companies do not provide many housing units that are actually affordable for the people living in the communities where the housing is being built.

Recently, he expressed the wish that begging was illegal, and he claimed that many people who engage in panhandling in New York City are gaming New Yorkers.

He’s wrong when it comes to the issues of [subway] fare evasion—it’s the second-most-common arrest by the NYPD, it’s clearly an arrest practice that criminalizes poverty. Most people don’t jump the turnstiles for the thrill of it, they jump the turnstiles because fare’s a financial burden. That’s a documented fact. De Blasio denies the fact of that. There are a number of areas where he is taking explicit steps that not only do not address social and racial inequities, they aggravate them. He is not a true progressive, he is not an honest progressive, so it’s relatively easy from that standpoint to run to the left of him. The bigger challenge is to get sufficient attention from the mainstream press to sufficiently educate the public that there are alternatives that are truly progressive, that are reasonable, can be instituted and would effectively address the problems that de Blasio is either ignoring or making worse.

But it’s a real effort to break through the media and their characterization that de Blasio is gliding through the election despite his lame policies, despite the wrong-headed moves he makes, like going off to Hamburg, Germany, just days after the police officer was killed; saying that he wishes begging was illegal; refusing to support reduced fare for low-income New Yorkers. Just issue after issue after issue.

Despite this failing to follow through on progressive policies, and despite a failure, or a lot of mistakes made as the leader of our city, it’s been a challenge to break through and to present ourselves as a competitive alternative to de Blasio.

PM: He’s still favored to win, though. So will your campaign have been worth it, if it’s not a winning campaign?

RG: Suppose I said, “Nah, you know, we’ve made a terrible mistake, I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing.” Of course I think it is worth it! Even the things that I mentioned, being on the Brian Lehrer show, being on Errol Lewis, being covered by The Nation. Last week, the Daily News published an op-ed of mine dismissing de Blasio’s cockamamie plan to close Rikers in 10 years and pledging that if I was elected mayor, we could close Rikers in one year. Coming out for decriminalizing marijuana possession, sex work, fare evasion, possession of a gravity knife—giving more heft and publicity to those kinds of positions even if we don’t carry the day by winning, educating more people [that] these are possible and reasonable alternatives is worth it. And we’re bringing attention to other issues, like class size. We think we can make the class size in every public school in New York City smaller.

PM: Let’s talk about the issue you’ve been working on for decades: criminal-justice reform. It seems like such a systemic issue. Is the only thing holding reform back the fact that you’re not mayor?

RG: Me being elected mayor is the solution to everything! [laughs] I don’t think there’s any policy as politicized as criminal justice, and politicians have traditionally been very wary of proposing any significant reform that could possibly either upset the major institutions that operate within the criminal justice system, particularly police departments and district attorneys, and the people who run the prisons and work in the prisons; and also the deep, deep fear that mainstream politicians have of being labeled soft on crime. That’s shifted over the years.

The political landscape has softened, but not sufficiently that any mainstream politician would propose fundamental reforms. The only real way to reform involves reducing the power, the resources, personnel of the police department, and no mainstream politician is going to propose that, even if they believe those steps were necessary. You can’t do it by adding body cameras, by applying more training, by doing something like de Blasio is doing and roll out these neighborhood policing programs. None of those steps are going to result in significant change in practices on the ground.

In New York City, all the officers who were directly involved in the death of Eric Garner still work for the police department, are still paid by New York taxpayer dollars. When I say that to a group, often there’s shock. And de Blasio didn’t have the political will to dismiss them.

PM: It’s one thing to talk about reform, it’s another to do it. Even de Blasio, who hasn’t been the biggest NYPD reform guy, had hundreds of cops turn their backs on him. So how do you change such an entrenched attitude?

RG: We need to be very clear on what needs to happen if we want to end abuse of discriminatory policing—and to exercise leadership that makes a real effort to go at white America’s deep-seated belief that their police departments and criminal-justice systems actually are just and fair.

If I get elected running that kind of campaign, it means that I have a lot of political muscle and leverage behind me. And if the police officers bail or have a mutiny, I’d fire them. The mayor has the power to suspend without pay any police officer, which is what de Blasio should have done on day 1 after seeing that Eric Garner video, because that would send a message not only to the community that black lives do matter, but to police officers about what kind of conduct the leadership of the city would tolerate.

PM: So you kind of have a reputation for being, I don’t know, maybe it’s just being an old New Yorker, but yeah, being kind of a funny, out-there guy. Has that helped or hurt during the campaign?

RG: Well, most people would characterize me as someone who attempts to be funny—not who is funny. I mean, it’s probably my own visceral natural tendencies, but to see the comic aspects of life generally—of work generally—and specifically this campaign is just a healthy way of going about the work, without detracting from this deep awareness about how serious this kind of work is, and how we have the potential for affecting people’s lives, and for eliminating abuses and injustices.

On November 9, people across the left woke up and wondered, “What do I do now? Under total Republican control, how does one fight for progressive change?”

Kali Akuno, the co-founder of Cooperation Jackson, a workers’ cooperative in Jackson, Mississippi, has been grappling with that question for years, and believes his organization provides a good model for progressives who still want to effect change under President Trump. When Donald Trump was elected, Akuno felt like he could tell the rest of the country: “Welcome to Mississippi.”

Mississippi also has the unfortunate distinction of having the highest rate of poverty in the United States, with a median income of just under $40,000 a year per household. The city of Jackson is worse off still: Its median household income is $33,000 per year. And the situation is even more dire for the city’s people of color, who make up the majority of the city’s residents: While the white population has a poverty rate of 14 percent, 34 percent of black Jackson residents are poor.

Despite all this, or perhaps because of it, Jackson has been a battleground for civil rights for decades. Many of the most famous protests of the civil-rights movements took place here. So did some of the era’s greatest tragedies, including the murder of Medgar Evers. Nonetheless, it’s rarely been a center of black political power—until a few years ago. That’s when longtime black radical activist, Chokwe Lumumba, was elected mayor of the city. He took office in 2013 with a mission to institute an ambitious plan to help elect black, progressive leaders throughout Jackson, and help foster a new, black-centered economy in the city. Unfortunately, he died less than a year into his mayoralty.

But the original ambition behind Lumumba’s election remains, in the form of a group of local black radicals who’ve organized under the banner of Cooperation Jackson.

Cooperation Jackson is a workers’ cooperative, started in 2013, that is striving to be a one-stop-shop for activism and economic development in the city. So far the co-op is small: a farm, a couple-dozen plots of land, a little over 100 dues-paying members, and a community center. But it’s aiming to be much more. The organization’s mission isn’t to just help Jackson residents, but to give them an entirely new, supportive economy in which to operate. The idea is essentially this: Since Jackson’s current economy isn’t working for its residents, and its current political system isn’t doing much to help, why not create a new economic and political system right alongside the old one?

“We want to become the dominant feature of our local economy,” Akuno told me over the phone. “It’s really about a localization of the economy, about maximum control in the community’s hands. These are the things we can do that protect us from the ravages of global capitalism.”

Co-ops of course aren’t a new idea, but Cooperation Jackson is unique in its comprehensiveness, its ambition, and its embrace of radical black politics. Akuno says he appreciates the work of other co-ops: There are plenty of examples of well-run economic alternatives to dominant economies, from a worker-run laundromat in Cleveland to the countless food co-ops throughout the United States. But many shy away from explicitly political goals. Cooperation Jackson, by contrast, wants to use worker-owned and -managed companies to create an economic alternative for black Jackson residents outside of capitalism, especially in an era of conservative political rule.

“We’ve learned how to implement and incite change without the support of most policy leaders,” Akuno says. “That’s a lesson the left is going to need to learn.”

As of now, Cooperation Jackson operates Freedom Farms, an urban-farming collaborative, and the Chokwe Lumumba Center for Economic Democracy and Development, a community center and small-businesses incubator. The organization is currently building out a café, has a catering operation, and is buying up vacant lots to create a community land trust—a nonprofit organization that manages land to ensure that it remains affordable as prices of commercially owned land fluctuate. It currently owns 25 plots and hopes to purchase 50 more in order to create a village of sustainable housing for low-income residents. The goal is to “decommodify as much land as possible,” says Akuno, as Jackson, like so many cities, undergoes a round of gentrification. They’re also starting a fund-raising initiative to build a production and fabrication center—essentially a flexibly configured factory that can be used for small-time manufacturing. So far nearly all of this is being funded by donations.

If this all sounds incredibly ambitious, it is. But it’s not without precedent. One of Cooperation Jackson’s inspirations is Mondragon, in Spain, which runs 261 businesses, 101 of which are cooperatives, and has just under 75,000 employees. (Most of Mondragon’s products are niche and industrial, but if you’ve purchased camera equipment, you’ve probably encountered Mondragon’s Kide brand.) Mondragon is often held up as an example of what worker cooperatives can do. It is relatively competitive with more traditional capitalist ventures, yet its entry-level workers start at about $32,000 per year, according to a 2015 interview with Josu Ugarte, the company’s director of international operations, and its managers are not allowed to make more than six times the salary of a worker. But it’s not without its critics, most of whom point out that operating a cooperative business in a capitalist economy means that the co-ops eventually have to mimic more exploitative capitalist practices in order to survive in the marketplace. As the writer and philosopher Phil Gasper points out, Mondragon doesn’t rank any better than similar private corporations in worker satisfaction.

That’s why Akuno envisions an entire economy of co-ops working together, and running independently from the dominant economy—co-op farms selling to co-op restaurants, co-op dry cleaners taking out loans from co-op banks. His dream is to create a “sister network” of co-ops across the globe, all working with one another to create an economy parallel to the one we live in but governed by different rules.

That goal might not be as far-fetched as it seems. A version of it already exists in Emilia Romagna, a region in Italy where several thousand interlinked manufacturing cooperatives have worked to support each other and turned the area into an industrial powerhouse. There’s also a deep history of cooperatives in the US going back to at least the early 1800s, including a black-led farmers’ cooperative in the South comprising 70 individual farming co-ops and currently representing 20,000 farming families. It has been operating for the last 40 years

All signs point to the co-op movement growing in the United States. According to one study, 60 percent of the 250 or so worker cooperatives currently operating in the country were formed after the year 2000. The biggest impediment to their future growth is that there’s not yet a way to ensure their sustainability; they have neither the size of Mondragon nor the government support of a place like Emilia Romagna, where the regional government has assisted in creating service centers to help keep each of the small manufacturing cooperatives up-to-date on product trends, pricing, and manufacturing techniques.

“You don’t have the closing of the loop,” says John Duda, the communications director for the Democracy Collaborative, an organization dedicated to supporting the development of co-ops and other vehicles of shared ownership. “You don’t have the economic activity to feed into the next generation.”

Akuno says the way to get there is to politicize co-ops so that they’re not just operating in a bubble, but as a cohesive system. That’s especially important under Trump, he adds.

“It’s not just about surviving,” he emphasizes. “We want to build a new economy, a new society. In order to do that, you have to survive, but you have to also grow and reach out and change people’s minds in the process.”

Akuno’s background is in politics and protest. He was part of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, a large, multi-city community organization that advocates for black liberation and the end of white supremacy. Four years ago, he helped elect Chokwe Lumumba as mayor of Jackson. He’s now hoping to bring that political experience into the cooperative world, to convince people that working together with shared responsibility isn’t just an economic task.

“People think running a business isn’t political,” Akuno says. “But business is the most political thing there is.”

]]>https://www.thenation.com/article/meet-the-radical-workers-cooperative-growing-in-the-heart-of-the-deep-south/These Cities Are at the Forefront of the Next Big Labor Struggle: the Fight for a Fair Workweekhttps://www.thenation.com/article/these-cities-are-at-the-forefront-of-the-next-big-labor-fight/Peter Moskowitz,Peter Moskowitz,Peter MoskowitzJan 23, 2017

Emeryville, California, is a tiny municipality surrounded by Oakland and San Francisco. Its population hovers under 12,000, yet the city has four shopping centers, making it, in essence, a giant outdoor mall for the Bay Area. Every chain you think of—Target, Gap, Sephora, Apple—has set up shop there. During the holiday season, that meant demand for workers spiked.

Monique Hendrix, 30, works part-time at the Bath and Body Works in Emeryville. She’s a “key holder” at her store, which means she performs the same duties as a manager, but with a lower hourly wage—and no ability to control her own schedule. That means Hendrix often gets her schedule a few days in advance, and the hours tend to be erratic—they change week to week. Sometimes she works more than 40 hours a week, sometimes she works less.

This past holiday season was one of Hendrix’s most difficult. She worked six or seven days a week, often closing some shifts and opening the next ones. That meant she would leave work at 11:30 pm, make the 45-minute trek home, and arrive for work again at 8am. One week, she worked nearly 60 hours. Hendrix wanted to request more days off, but she knew there was a risk if she did: When another worker at her store told their district manager she was thinking of getting another part-time job, the manager made it clear to this worker that she’d have to leave if she did.

“I get no slack,” said Hendrix, who is the mother of a 9-year-old son. “It’s starting to affect my home life. I had an emergency meeting with my district manager, but all she cares about is numbers.”

Happily, workers like Hendrix may soon get a reprieve. This past October, the Emeryville City Council became the latest municipality to pass a “fair workweek” law. Starting July 2017, the law will require large employers like Bath and Body Works to give their employees two weeks advance notice of their schedule, pay them more if they make last-minute changes to it, and offer them extra hours before hiring more part-time staffers. It’s part of a nationwide push being led by the Fair Workweek Initiative of the Center for Popular Democracy and a slew of nonprofits in cities where part-time, unpredictable work has become as big a scourge as low wages.

The fight for a humane work schedule has a long history in the struggle for workers’ rights in this country. Beginning at least as far back as the 1820s, when East Coast craftsmen began agitating for a 10-hour day, workers have been pressing for more control over the days and times they’re required to work. For many decades, the emphasis was on limiting hours, which could be copious and overwhelming: In 1890, when the government first began tracking such information, manufacturing workers reportedly averaged 100 hours a week. It was this outrage—the outrage of overwork—that led unions to fight for, and win, an eight-hour workday, and a two-day weekend.

But over the last several decades, as union membership has declined, and retail work has largely replaced manufacturing jobs, a different kind of scheduling problem has emerged: These days, most retail work is part-time, with a process known as “just-in-time” scheduling—which pins workers’ schedules to customer shopping patterns—often dictating the hours. For low-wage workers, this means that erratic schedules, inconsistent hours, and short notice of scheduling changes are the new normal. So too is underemployment—although just-in-time scheduling can translate into workers’, like Hendrix, being over-scheduled during some weeks of the year. New fair-workweek laws are hoping to change that by forcing employers to give workers more consistent and reliable schedules.

“I hope this legislation gives people better insight into what a company is supposed to be like,” Hendrix said. “There’s no reason you should have to choose between supporting your family and being with your family.”

Fair-scheduling legislation has been gaining steam for a few years, but 2016 seems to have been something of a tipping point. In 2014, San Francisco became the first city in the country to pass fair-workweek legislation. Then, in September of last year, New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio announced that he will support fair-scheduling legislation for fast-food workers in the city (the Center for Popular Democracy said it expects a measure to be introduced there soon). Less than a week later, Seattle became the second city to enact its own legislation. And in October, Washington, DC, passed a scheduling law specific to building-maintenance employees. In November, San Jose voters approved a ballot measure that ensures part-time workers will be offered extra hours before new, part-time employees are brought on.

Meanwhile, just before Christmas, six chain retailers announced they would end on-call scheduling (the practice of calling employees just a few hours before a shift and expecting them to be free). The move could affect 50,000 workers. And three major cities will put forward fair-workweek legislation this year, according to Carrie Gleason, who leads the Fair Workweek Initiative for the Center for Popular Democracy (she can’t say which because the cities aren’t ready to go public yet).

“In some sense, the new Trump administration is inspiring local and state policymakers to go bolder and set the standard for work,” she said. “We’ll see mounting pressure from retail workers themselves. We’ll see more and more people willing to step up, because they can’t count on the [federal] government protecting us.”

Although fair-workweek laws are still relatively rare, the momentum behind them can be seen as part of the nationwide push for better standards of pay and improved working conditions that has been building over the last few years. The Fight for $15, which has been at the forefront of this movement, highlighted the plight of fast-food and other low-wage workers, and helped successfully pass minimum-wage laws in dozens of municipalities. Campaigns for paid sick leave, at the city level as well as for federal government contractors, have won more than a million workers the right to stay home or see a doctor when they are feeling too ill to work.

While the fight for higher wages has garnered much of the attention of the media and politicians, scheduling has remained, until recently, an under-discussed topic, even as it becomes ever more crucial to workers’ rights. The percentage of part-time workers has been steadily increasing over the decades, from 13.5 percent in 1968 to a high of 20.1 percent in 2010 (since then, it’s fallen to about 18 percent). In some metropolises, the numbers of part-time workers is significantly higher. In San Jose, for example, about 43 percent of work is part-time, up from 26 percent 10 years ago. While retail and food workers are most likely to face part-time shifts, even white-collar jobs are increasingly part-time, according to one study.

Part-time jobs have obvious disadvantages. They usually do not provide health insurance; they tend to pay lower wages, forcing workers to rely on government assistance or multiple jobs to eke out a living; and, of course, schedules are often wildly unpredictable, meaning that it’s hard for workers to make time for family, school, or anything else.

“It really wreaks havoc on people’s non-work lives,” said Susan Lambert, a professor at the University of Chicago and a co-author of one of the biggest studies on part-time work. “It’s been wonderful to see increases in the minimum wage, but that’s only one side. Scheduling legislation goes hand-in-hand with the minimum wage.”

Predictably, the retail industry has come out strong against fair workweek legislation, with local retail associations claiming the legislation will force employers to lay off workers or close stores. But according to Seema Patel, the deputy director of the San Francisco Office of Labor Standards Enforcement, which has been overseeing San Francisco’s implementation of the law since 2014, those fears have not come to pass.

“I have not heard from a single employer that this ordinance has had a negative impact on their business,” Patel said. “I certainly expected to hear more, but I cannot count one.”

Emeryville provides another good example of how corporate concerns about profit versus workers’ rights may be overblown: Since mid-2015, the city has had one of the highest minimum wages in the nation, but the chain stores there have stayed open, and expanded, over the last year.

The organizers behind the push for a fair workweek were hopeful that the 2016 presidential election would help elevate workers’ issues, like fair scheduling, to the national level and would even build toward federal legislation. But Donald Trump’s election has dashed those hopes, shifting attention back to the local campaigns that are, for now, workers’ best bets.

“If we saw anything is this last election, it’s that cities and states are the bright spots right now,” said Jennifer Lin, the deputy director of EBASE, the main local nonprofit that pushed for fair workweek legislation in Emeryville. “The national level was pretty devastating for low-wage workers, and workers in general this year. But at the local level we’re doubling down.”

Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that the California Retailers Association is petitioning Emeryville to repeal its predictive scheduling ordinance. That is incorrect. CRA has not petitioned the city to overturn the new fair workweek requirements. We apologize for the error.

Taif Jany is a rising young policy expert who was born and raised in Iraq and now lives in Washington, DC. His family is Mandaean, not Muslim, but his birthplace and brown skin make him feel like a target all the time. He sometimes looks over his shoulder when he walks through DC, where he works as policy coordinator for the Young Elected Officials (YEO) Network Action, a program of People for the American Way. Over the last year, his feelings of insecurity have only gotten worse.

“Personally I feel intimidated when I walk around the street,” said Jany. “I feel like I’m an easy target, even though I’m not Muslim. I hear from some of my Muslim friends about daily harassment in cities, suburbs, everywhere.”

And that was before Donald Trump won the presidential election.

Jany and his friends have good reason to be scared. Muslims, along with Arabs and South Asians more broadly, are under assault in the United States. While anti-Muslim bigotry has a long and grotesque history in this country, the shape and nature of the bias has intensified during the last few years, with Muslims suffering the fallout in deeds as well as words. In 2015, 78 mosques were targeted for arson or other forms of vandalism, more than triple the number of mosques targeted in the two years prior. Since 2010, ten states have passed “anti-Sharia” laws, with a majority of the rest pushing to add “anti-Sharia” measures to their books, never mind the fact that Sharia poses zero threat, legal or otherwise, to American constitutional law. And hate crimes are on the rise across the country, with official reports of anti-Muslim crimes jumping from 154 in 2014 to 174 in 2015.

Then there is the rhetoric—poison-tipped words and proposals deployed, not merely by fringe-racist characters like Pamela Geller but also by leading political figures who have turned Muslim bashing into campaign-season sport. Trump has rightly garnered the most attention with his pitch for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims” seeking to come to the country, followed by the allegedly toned-down version of that pitch—his call for “extreme vetting.” He has also said he would “implement” a database to track Muslims. But he has hardly been the only one to embrace bigotry. Almost all of his Republican primary competitors trafficked, at some point or another, in anti-Muslim slurs, with Ben Carson comparing Syrian refugees to “rabid dogs” and Mike Huckabee describing Muslims as “uncorked animals.” And such rhetoric hurts; it has real, often violent, consequences. One recent Georgetown University study found that anti-Muslim attacks corresponded with calls from prominent politicians to ban Muslim immigrants.

That’s why Jany, along with hundreds of politicians and local leaders across the country have begun pushing back. Under the aegis of the American Leaders Against Hate and Anti-Muslim Bigotry Campaign, progressive officials at every level of local government have begun introducing legislation and pressing for policies that combat Islamophobia. From school-district initiatives in California and elsewhere that require schools to monitor religious bullying, to advertising and education campaigns in cities like New York that aim to teach non-Muslims about Muslim communities, local officials are joining forces with Muslim constituents to show what true leadership looks like. In the last month alone, the city councils of Columbus (Ohio) and New York City passed resolutions condemning Islamophobia—and affirming support for Muslim communities.

“We were regressing into more and more Islamophobia,” said Daneek Miller, who represents southeast Queens as the New York City Council’s only Muslim member and who helped pass the New York resolution. “These last six months or so, with Trump, have made things worse. We had to do something to reverse the trend.”

These new efforts are taking root in cities and towns across the country, creating oases of tolerance in some of the most unlikely states. In Kansas City, Missouri, the school board recently passed a resolution that condemns hate speech against Muslims and those who might be mistaken for Muslims, and explicitly supports its Muslim students. The Metro Nashville Public School Board in Tennessee adopted a similar resolution on October 11.

The American Leaders Against Hate campaign is the joint creation of Local Progress, a network of hundreds of progressive local officials, and the YEO Network Action, which came together earlier this year in the hope of transforming isolated local initiatives into a national platform against Islamophobia. Even before the campaign began mobilizing officials, the occasional mayor or city council would attempt isolated interventions. (In Muncie, Indiana, home state of Trump running mate Mike Pence, for instance, the City Council passed a unanimous resolution promoting religious freedom this past March.) Since the campaign’s launch, these interventions have accelerated rapidly in number as well as kind.

The campaign has thus far come up with about a dozen policy solutions to reduce Islamophobia. Some of them are relatively easy lifts that can be done on a local level. For instance, school districts can write into their bylaws explicit support for Muslim students, and a commitment to hold those who discriminate based on race or religion accountable for their actions. Many school districts have begun to take bullying more seriously; the American Leaders Against Hate campaign suggests being extra-vigilant about bullying based on religion or skin color, including a formalized tracking system for incidents.

Schools can also work anti-bullying and pro-diversity information into their curricula. They can train teachers and guidance counselors to not only know more about Muslim cultures but also to know how to spot bias within themselves and their students, and how to deal with it. While these measures are relatively minor tweaks on their own, together they add up to providing more inclusive environments for Muslim kids and others whose place of birth or religion make them susceptible to Trump-style bigotry.

Other policy changes, such as establishing anti-profiling measures for police, will need to clear more hurdles. But the first step toward clearing those hurdles is to get local elected leaders together to create a national platform capable of tackling bigger issues. The American Leaders Against Hate campaign, for instance, has recommended that states curb surveillance, which disproportionately affects Muslim communities. In the age of NSA data mining, that might be a big ask, but local officials are already making some headway. In June, Santa Clara County, California, passed a landmark ordinance that will help inform citizens about new technology the government is using for policing and surveillance, and make the legal framework for using those technologies transparent and open for debate.

While many of the efforts have been warmly received, a few have run into the buzzsaw of anti-Muslim hysteria either during or after their passage. In Kansas City, for instance, the school-board resolution condemning anti-Muslim hate speech caused an uproar that spread well beyond the city. Despite the fact that the resolution doesn’t require any major changes to school curricula, conservative websites warned of “creeping Sharia law,” and the school district received thousands of angry, sometimes violent, e-mails, many originating from an extremist group called Act for America. The barrage was so intense that the school district had to set special e-mail filters so that its employees could conduct normal business.

That backlash, Kansas City Board of Education chair Melissa Robinson said, was further proof of the amount of work needed to combat Islamophobia. “It’s an illumination of the hate that’s going on around our country,” Robinson said. “As an African-American woman, thinking about the history of what it means to be black in this country, I can relate to what they’re going through in a very deep way.”

Robinson says Kansas City Public Schools joined the American Leaders Against Hate campaign because they understood that Islamophobia wasn’t limited to the city’s school district. The campaign allows local action, like the kind Robinson is doing in Kansas, to have national impact.

While policy is the end goal of the nationwide campaign, its organizers also see it as a chance for ramping up pro-diversity rhetoric. Just as Donald Trump’s verbal attacks on Muslims have led to an increase in anti-Muslim violence, members of the American Leaders Against Hate campaign are hoping that by highlighting Islamophobia and the need for diversity and tolerance, they’ll be able to spur action in the other direction. That’s why the first part of the campaign has involved getting hundreds of local leaders to sign a letter pledging their support for Muslim communities: to show there is a large and effective counterweight to hateful rhetoric.

As the letter demonstrates, countering hateful rhetoric doesn’t have to involve arduous policy change. Instead, it can involve leaders using their positions of power to call for greater tolerance. Under New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, for example, the city has begun an ad campaign to not only promote tolerance, but also ensure that Muslim New Yorkers feel welcome in the city. And in Minnesota, which has the largest Somali population in the United States, Abdi Warsame, a City Council member and Local Progress stalwart, has been using his platform to call for greater understanding between the Muslim and non-Muslim community, and to push for city services to be accessible to people who speak different languages, a boon to the city’s large Somali population.

“It’s very important to highlight the issue of Islamophobia in the same way we’d highlight anti-Semitism or homophobia, and start having a dialogue and discourse,” Warsame said. “We want to bring people together to discuss this issue. It’s not just about Muslims. It’s about who we want to be as cities, as states, as a country.”

As the Democratic National Convention ramps up in Philadelphia, some themes have emerged: party unity, national security, and a stronger, more equitable economy. The platform presented by the Democrats is undoubtedly more progressive than it’s been in years past, but absent from the speeches are many issues that affect cities like the one where thousands of delegates are currently gathered: nuts and bolts urban policies like housing affordability, transportation funding, and access to good public schools. Those issues are addressed in the official platform of the Democratic National Committee, but at a time when inequality is at an all-time high in many urban areas, when gentrification and housing prices are pushing poor people out of cities, and environmental injustices are sickening city residents (see: Flint), neither party seems particularly interested in addressing the most pressing needs of US cities.

Enter Local Progress, a nonprofit that links together hundreds of progressive local elected leaders in cities across the country in an effort to push for local policy change, from minimum-wage increases and anti–wage theft enforcement, to housing-discrimination laws and renewable-energy strategies. On Tuesday, the organization’s members met at the Ethical Society, just a few blocks from the DNC, to release their first national policy platform. The platform, its leaders say, is an effort to highlight the reality that, to a notable degree, the nation’s progress hinges on local urban change—and this change is nearly impossible without increased federal help.

“If you talk to local electeds in red or blue states, in cities large or small, you’ll hear about the need for things like more Section 8 housing, and yet you rarely hear those issues mentioned at a national level,” Brad Lander, a New York City Council member and one of the founders of Local Progress, said in a phone call before the gathering. “These issues take up so much space in people’s lives, and in local politics, and it’s kind of ridiculous they’re not more featured at the national level. That’s what we’re trying to do.”

The platform opens with soaring language: “This election year, as we witness hatred and xenophobia being marshaled in support of a reactionary national agenda, we stand together in support of a different vision for making America great: economic inclusion, racial equity, sustainable communities, and justice for all. We believe that the Federal Government can and must play a central role in supporting localities’ efforts to create a more just and equitable society. This is our vision for that collaboration.”

But while the vision is expansive, the plan itself isn’t made up of sweeping rhetoric, but instead goes for realistic policy changes and tweaks that have already been proven to work on a local level. It’s the difference between constantly swinging for the fences (and often failing), and playing small ball: making incremental progress that translates into real wins for tens of millions of Americans, and in the process proving that progressive policy is not a boogeyman. Not unlike the “Sewer Socialism” of old, many of the issues embraced by Local Progress have been deemed not sexy enough for prime-time stump speeches, but they’re issues that nonetheless directly impact most Americans’ lives.

The Local Progress platform is organized around four themes: shared prosperity, sustainable and livable communities, equal justice, and good government. Its economic proposals include things like increasing federal grants to cities so they can experiment with jobs programs for low-income workers and implementing stricter labor laws and higher minimum wages. Education is also included under the “shared prosperity” theme: Local Progress recommends Congress provide additional federal funding to states so they can fully make up the difference between the money spent on educating students in poorer and richer districts, train teachers to deal with racial and economic disparities in the classrooms, and adequately evaluate the impact of charter schools on segregation. The platform also posits that without increased funding for affordable housing, Section 8 vouchers, and incentives for cities to implement anti-displacement measures like rent control, low-income people won’t be able to hold down the kind of jobs needed to make it to the middle class. (Rents have skyrocketed since the Great Recession, as fewer people can put up the down payment required to buy a home, and as corporate consolidation has decreased competition in the rental market.)

On the environment front, the platform points out that environmentalism, racial justice, and equitable cities are all linked, and uses the recent water crisis in Flint as an example of why more funding for infrastructure is needed. According to the platform’s backers, small changes in federal policy, like requiring regular testing of water supplies, would go a long way toward helping urban centers remain healthy. The platform also recommends redirecting highway dollars away from states and to cities so that planners can focus on creating public transit-centric cities, instead of sprawling megalopolises.

Social justice is a significant part of the platform as well. Policing and criminal-justice reform have become big issues in the presidential election this year, and Hillary Clinton has detailed the problems of mass incarceration and racial bias in her own platform. There’s a lot of overlap between what she and Local Progress suggest: sentencing reform, strengthening investigations of officer-involved shootings. But Local Progress goes further, suggesting local police be required to keep data on their methods of policing (stop-and-frisk, use of force, arrest data), and be barred from receiving military-style equipment in most cases. The Local Progress platform also goes far beyond Clinton’s platform in recommending reforms to the country’s immigration system, pointing out that people being deported don’t have the same rights as others to counsel, and are often housed in private prisons that have a vested interest in keeping imprisonment numbers high.

And lastly, the Local Progress platform recommends a slew of voting and good government reforms—things like increasing support for early voting and motor-voter laws, increasing funding for voting technology modernization, and helping support experiments in participatory budgeting.

Helen Gym, a councilwoman from Philadelphia and a member of Local Progress, said that inequality is the biggest issue her city faces—Pennsylvania has often been cited as the poorest big city in America. While Congress has been spinning its legislative wheels, local leaders have begun addressing the problem head-on by pushing for things like a higher minimum wage, a mandatory sick-leave policy, and investments in the city’s education system. The question on Gym’s mind is whether national Democrats will follow local leaders in their march toward progressive policy.

“Our platform evolved out of the community struggles that we’re trying to deal with at a grassroots level,” she said. “We have to keep pushing the [Democratic] party harder to follow suit. We’ve seen a lot of progress, but there’s a really long way to go.”

Downtown Chattanooga looks like a lot of postindustrial cities: wide streets, a mix of old brick buildings, and uninspired ’60s-era brutalism. Except there’s something here that many small downtowns do without these days: people. And many of them are here not just for the usual accoutrements of your average gentrified downtown—fancy restaurants, condos, and concert venues (though those do exist here), but for something more basic, and arguably much more important: the Internet.

In 2010, Chattanooga became the first city in the United States to be wired by a municipality for 1 gigabit-per-second fiber-optic Internet service. Five years later, the city began offering 10 gigabit-per-second service (for comparison, Time Warner Cable’s maxes out at 300 megabits per second). That has attracted dozens of tech firms to the city that take advantage of the fast connections for things like telehealth-app development and 3D printing, and it’s given downtown Chattanooga a vibrancy rare in an age when small city centers have been emptied out by deindustrialization and the suburbs.

The feat was made possible not by a tech giant but by the city’s municipal power company, EPB, which in 2007 set out to modernize the city’s power grid, and realized it could lay every customer’s home for fiber-optic cable at the same time. The near-decade-long experiment has worked: By offering gigabit connections at $70 a month and providing discounts for low-income residents, EPB has taken tens of thousands of customers from the Internet behemoth Comcast, which offers service that is about 85 percent slower at twice the price. EPB now serves about 82,000 people, more than half of the area’s Internet market. It’s been such a success that dozens of other towns and cities have begun their own municipal broadband networks, providing faster and cheaper service than private companies.

“Really, these last two years you’ve seen it pick up steam,” said Christopher Mitchell, the director of the Community Broadband Networks Initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR). “It’s just going to keep on spreading.”

Six years ago, Chattanooga was the only city offering publicly owned 1-gigabit Internet service. Today, over 50 communities do, according to ILSR, and there are over 450 communities in the United States offering some form of publicly owned Internet service. Many municipal networks are in small towns and rural areas where private high-speed access is hard to come by. But several dozen are in cities like Chattanooga, where there are other, private options that tend to be much more expensive and slower than what governments have proven they can provide.

Even in places where private companies provide high-speed service, a public Internet option may prove increasingly vital to low-income residents. Internet inequality is a growing issue in the United States: Internet connections are often required for job applications, and seven in 10 teachers assign homework that requires broadband access, according to FCC commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel; yet about one-third of low-income families don’t have high-speed access to the Internet in their homes. Part of the problem is geography: Private Internet companies have little incentive to lay cable to sparsely populated areas. But even bigger cities usually only have one or two options for private Internet access, and so companies like Comcast have little competition and therefore little incentive to make their services affordable for low-income families.

Municipal Internet helps solve both of those issues. Homes, no matter how rural, are usually already wired for electricity by a municipal provider; it’s not too much extra work to follow those lines with fiber-optic cables. Chattanooga did not have to raise taxes or find additional revenue within its budget to pay for its system, which covers many of the area’s most remote houses. The utility simply laid the cable, charged for it, and is now reaping the benefits.

EPB spent about $220 million developing its fiber-optic system, and that’s translated into more than $865 million in economic growth for the city. The network also allows EPB to distribute its electricity more cheaply by monitoring and shutting off areas that are causing problems during storms, finding where repairs need to be made, and routing power more efficiently. And that means EPB can afford to offer the Internet to low-income families at significantly reduced prices, providing any family with children who receive free or discounted lunches at school 100 megabit service (which is several times faster than standard cable-company plans) for $26.99. So far, about 1,800 families are taking advantage of the program.

“We really believe strongly that we should be open and available to everyone and not slow them down,” said David Wade, the chief operating officer of EPB. “Everyone deserves at least 100 megabits.”

Most municipalities don’t have official mandates to make Internet access more equitable, but it seems that equity is nonetheless a central concern of many municipal providers. In Wilson, North Carolina (population: 50,000), the city began laying fiber-optic cables between government buildings in order to better share information, and decided it could expand the service to others. The city now offers free WiFi downtown and has teamed up with two nonprofit after-school programs to provide the Internet to low-income kids. The small city of Sandy, Oregon, doesn’t have discounted plans, but its municipal service nonetheless is cheaper than corporate providers—100 megabits costs only $40 a month.

“Just like we provide parks and trails and other amenities, we also feel like…having great Internet is a reason to live here,” Seth Atkinson, Sandy’s city manager, said.

But the biggest problem facing municipal Internet services isn’t scale or the size of cities; it’s the cable companies. When Chattanooga first started planning its municipal network, Comcast sued, saying the service amounted to unfair competition for the company. It lost the suit, but Comcast and other companies have spent millions of dollars on ad campaigns and donations to local politicians in the hope that municipal providers don’t expand more than they already have. The company has a history of supporting politicians opposed to public Internet service and lobbying state legislatures to pass legislation that prevents cities and towns from offering their services outside of their municipal boundaries. Eighteen states now have anti-expansion laws on the books.

Chattanooga and Wilson have both sought to expand beyond their current service areas, and last year the Federal Communications Commission ruled in their favor, preempting both Tennessee and North Carolina’s anti-expansion laws. But North Carolina’s attorney general sued the FCC in response, saying that “the FCC unlawfully inserted itself between the State and the State’s political subdivisions.” Both Chattanooga and Wilson are now waiting for a final determination before they decide whether to expand their service areas.

Regardless of how the FCC’s suit eventually pans out, more and more municipalities will likely keep building Internet networks. But if the FCC eventually rules in favor of municipalities like Chattanooga and Wilson, a public Internet option could grow a whole lot bigger a whole lot faster.